Well, I am editing, editing, edition. After so many long years of academia in which
a) I had many resources at my fingertips for working on papers and
b) I was usually working to find enough to say to meet length requirements
it is now proving very strange and challenging to attempt to cut a nearly 19,000 word thesis down to a 9000-10,000 word article with no resources but my laptop and whatever is available online (mostly relevant in the form of Webster's Dictionary which my publisher uses as their standard for spelling). I also need to adapt to Chicago Style rather than my more accustomed MLA (Chicago Manual of Style offers some quick and dirty guides to their system, but I could really use the handbook). I don't even have the original texts of the works I'm analyzing. Oh, sure, I could find a version of them online, but it wouldn't be the edition I'd used for the rest. Thankfully that hasn't yet become an issue given that I am frantically cutting things, not looking to add any extra quotes.
Well, I've got things down to 15,000 words, cutting about 4000 so far (I remember writing essays that were only 4000 words long!) but the next 4000 will be far harder cut and that last 1000 will, I imagine, be hardest yet.
I've had more discipline than I might have guessed after such a long break at actually working on this paper in a sustained manner. Nevertheless, editing has to be one of my least favorite parts of paper writing--researching being the most fun, followed by analyzing the research.
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12,800 and counting down
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